AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. In addition to a large number of bugfixes, 23.2 includes several new packages, such as the CEDET suite of development tools and a new mode for editing Javascript.

"...you can run Elisp (the Lisp interpreter Emacs is built on) programs from outside Emacs [...] This will make Emacs work like Perl or Python or Ruby or Bash—an interpreter that reads the rest of the program and executes the code..." -- nota bene: I love Emacs as a text editor!

"I've written a new JavaScript editing mode for GNU Emacs, and released it on code.google.com. This is part of a larger project, in progress, to permit writing Emacs extensions in JavaScript instead of Emacs-Lisp. Lest ye judge: hey, some people swing that way. The larger project is well underway, but probably won't be out until late summer or early fall.

"If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you [...] You see, Emacs isn't a text editor. Emacs is a programming language that you can use to write your own text editor..."

"I use Emacs for all text editing, except for LaTeX which I use Texmaker for due to the quick start wizard, and quick build functions. Yesterday, I decided to try to implement these functions in elisp, Emac’s dialect of Lisp..."

"...Emacs is an extensible, customizable, full-screen text editor. You can learn enough to be productive in Emacs in 30 minutes, but there is enough to learn about Emacs to keep you busy for years. The goal of this tutorial is to show you enough so that you are comfortable using Emacs as a work environment, not just as a text editor..."

"...This essay is meant to put off some common wishful thinking. As noted before, a major benefit of a emacs with Common Lisp or Scheme Lisp is that they provide a unified, packaged, system for development of these languages, and since it uses the same language to extend functionality of the editor, it will transparently increase the number of developers for the editor as well as the language..."

"EMACS(1) is a real-time display editor which can be extended by the user while it is running. Extensibility means that the user can add new editing commands or change old ones to fit his editing needs, while he is editing. EMACS is written in a modular fashion, composed of many separate and independent functions.